Using Hot Tap Water.

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taxlady

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I rarely cook plain rice in an oven because it is so easy to cook plain rice on the stovetop. I do however cook Indian biryani and pulao's in the oven. Here's how I would cook the rice. I am assuming you want to start with 2 cups of raw basmati rice.

Rinse 2.5 cups (yes, little more than you need) of rice with cold water until the water runs clear. Leave the rice soaking in cold water for about 20 minutes. This step is important or the rice will not cook.

Drain the rice and add to a dutch oven. Add 2.5 cups of hot tap water. Add salt to taste.

Seal the dutch oven with two sheets of foil and then with the dutch oven lid.

Place in a 375 degree oven for 60 minutes. Check and see if the rice is cooked at this point. If its not, re-seal and continue to bake for an additional 30 minutes.

Remove from oven. Add a tablespoon of butter and salt (if needed). Fluff with a fork. Remove to a platter or bowl and serve.

If you used a non-stick dutch oven, you can flip the rice onto a plate or tray so that the rice resembles a golden brown cake. The brown, crispy rice on the outside is considered to be a delicacy in some cuisines.
Never use water from the hot tap for food or beverages. It isn't safe. There can be micro-organisms from the water heater and there can be heavy metals from the pipes. It isn't intended for drinking or eating. Just heat some water from the cold tap (or your water filter) in a kettle or saucepan.
 
Never use water from the hot tap for food or beverages. It isn't safe. There can be micro-organisms from the water heater and there can be heavy metals from the pipes. It isn't intended for drinking or eating. Just heat some water from the cold tap (or your water filter) in a kettle or saucepan.

A lot of this stuff comes from companies in the business of selling home water filter and distilling systems. And from people just guessing and answering questions on Ask or Yahoo Answers when they don't really know. There is, in fact, one caution about consuming water from the hot tap, which I'll talk about at the end.

A water heater is lined with glass or ceramic. No significant exposed metals in the tank.

The material that is precipitated out in the tank is primarily calcium and magnesium. And of course, having precipitated, it does not go back into solution. Plus, they are essential elements for humans and might or might not be a good or bad factor in heart health. Studies are inconclusive and in conflict.

The water is still chlorinated and therefore still effectively protected against most organisms. If you don't have faith in the effectiveness of chlorination, you should certain not drink the cold water, either. Ask and water department worker or firefighter what comes out of the pipe when you flush a water main.

It would be a very rare home that had lead pipes. They are iron, copper, or PVC. The 1986 Safe Drinking Water Act as amended in 1996 (USEPA, 2000) banned all lead plumbing solder and pipe and all brass containing more than 8 percent lead. If you have lead pipes, don't drink the cold water, either. If you're worried about some difference in how readily hot and cold water leach lead, why are you still living with lead pipes and fixtures?

Water heaters should be set to at least 140F. If you set yours to 120F, you are just challenging the chlorination to handle an good breeding temperature for many organism. This is not an issue of domestic hot water being unsafe. It is an issue of a consumer misusing a piece of equipment. Just because you set it to 120F to make it safe for children to expose themselves to unmixed hot water doesn't make it a proper use of the water heater. It's just an easy way out to avoid the proper solution, a temperature control at the water use point.

Make your own decisions, but know why.
 
A lot of this stuff comes from companies in the business of selling home water filter and distilling systems. And from people just guessing and answering questions on Ask or Yahoo Answers when they don't really know. There is, in fact, one caution about consuming water from the hot tap, which I'll talk about at the end.

A water heater is lined with glass or ceramic. No significant exposed metals in the tank.

The material that is precipitated out in the tank is primarily calcium and magnesium. And of course, having precipitated, it does not go back into solution. Plus, they are essential elements for humans and might or might not be a good or bad factor in heart health. Studies are inconclusive and in conflict.

The water is still chlorinated and therefore still effectively protected against most organisms. If you don't have faith in the effectiveness of chlorination, you should certain not drink the cold water, either. Ask and water department worker or firefighter what comes out of the pipe when you flush a water main.

It would be a very rare home that had lead pipes. They are iron, copper, or PVC. The 1986 Safe Drinking Water Act as amended in 1996 (USEPA, 2000) banned all lead plumbing solder and pipe and all brass containing more than 8 percent lead. If you have lead pipes, don't drink the cold water, either. If you're worried about some difference in how readily hot and cold water leach lead, why are you still living with lead pipes and fixtures?

Water heaters should be set to at least 140F. If you set yours to 120F, you are just challenging the chlorination to handle an good breeding temperature for many organism. This is not an issue of domestic hot water being unsafe. It is an issue of a consumer misusing a piece of equipment. Just because you set it to 120F to make it safe for children to expose themselves to unmixed hot water doesn't make it a proper use of the water heater. It's just an easy way out to avoid the proper solution, a temperature control at the water use point.

Make your own decisions, but know why.
I have researched this on the web numerous times. I find trustworthy sites like, Hydro-Québec - Water heaters and Lead in Drinking Water | Lead | US EPA.

Hydro Québec, the government owned electricity company in Quebec says that "...an estimated 25% of all water heaters are contaminated by legionella bacteria."

According to the US EPA, "However, new homes are also at risk: even legally “lead-free” plumbing may contain up to 8 percent lead. The most common problem is with brass or chrome-plated brass faucets and fixtures which can leach significant amounts of lead into the water, especially hot water."

Hot water dissolves more contaminants into the water than cold water does.

Most people don't live in homes built since 1996 and not everyone lives in the US, where the law applies.

Lots of people don't know that they should leave their water heaters at 140F (60C). I think ours is set to 160F, we don't have any children. Lots of people don't have the kind of faucet that makes the higher temperatures safer.

Worried about lead pipes? Not usually the issue, it's lead solder that is far more likely. I'm sure there is lead solder on my pipes, even if it isn't used any more and I don't know if it is still used in Canada. More lead leaches into hot water than into cold. I use a Britta water filter - not perfect, but it removes most of that stuff (not the micro-organisms). I also run the cold water until it gets cold, so I know it isn't water that has been sitting in my pipes, leaching stuff.

I just don't see it as being a big inconvenience to only use water from the cold tap.
 
I always start with cold tap water. That's what my mom did and my grandmother did. I don't have a scientific reason for it, just the way it was done.
 
GLC, if you live in an old city like Boston, you will find a lot of the buildings still have lead pipes. In fact we still have some carved out tree trunks that our city water runs through. They all get replaced when something goes wrong. In Boston, you cannot rent an apartment or home that has lead pipes in the apartment or living quarters. You must replace all the pipes throughout the apartments before you can get a "Fit for Occupancy" certificate. But that doesn't mean there aren't lead pipes in the cellar coming in from the street. You only have to replace the pipes in the living quarters. If and when the pipes in the cellar break or spring a leak, you must replace all of the lead piping. Not just the part that is leaking. Most of the tenement and walkup apartments were built in the early 1900's. It wasn't until the 1950's that is was determined for sure that lead poisoning was affecting our children.

The City of Boston went on a rampage (a good one) and ordered that all children be tested for lead poisoning. It was introduced in every school. Done in every doctor's office, In all ERs. Anywhere that a child came in contract with health care. A lot of the immigrants didn't understand why. But they had no choice.

As a result of the seriousness of the problem, most of our buildings are now free of lead pipes. But there are still some out there. Everytime a renter registers a complaint with the Building Department for any Code violation, the BD can order that any found lead pipes be replaced, no matter where they are, no matter what the original complaint was. Even in the cellar.

We now have smarter kids. :angel:
 
In order for Calcium and Magnesium to have the ability to precipitate out of solution there has to be a high concentration of the metals in solution. This means there are high concentrations of both and other metals in your hot water tank.

Use cold water and heat it up, reduce the risk of overdosing your system with metals your body doesn't need.
 
I never use the hot tap water for consumption. Really it is by habit.

I did see to remember something about not using hot tap water for Netipots as it can risk some brain eating nasty that can't get you from drinking, only from snorting the water.
 
I never use the hot tap water for consumption. Really it is by habit.

I did see to remember something about not using hot tap water for Netipots as it can risk some brain eating nasty that can't get you from drinking, only from snorting the water.

What can you get from snorting Pepsi???:ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 
I don't use hot tap water for the simple reason that when you heat water the dissolved gasses come out. This is why you sometimes hear the water heater bubbling when you turn on the hot water taps. Water tastes better with dissolved gasses particularly oxygen. It is dead when they are evaporated and missing in the water.

If your water heater and piping are designed properly, and if you have a clean municipal water then you should have no worries about your water, hot or cold. I see no reason to not drink (or otherwise consume) the hot water except that it will taste dead. If your cold water is not fit for consumption then your hot water won't be fit either, but if you drink the cold tap water then I see no other reason to not drink or consume hot water--except that it will be dead because all the dissolved gasses are gone.

Your hot water should be set to the correct temperature. You can use an instant read thermometer to calibrate it, just let the water run for long enough to reach steady state and measure it. Change the thermostat depending on whether it's too hot or too cold. It should be hot enough to ensure that bacteria cannot grow in your hot water tank. It should be not so hot that it constitutes a scalding hazard. I'll leave it up to everybody to Google and read some articles to determine for themselves which is the best temperature.

If your municipal water is safe, if your plumbing and hot water heater are correctly designed, then there is no reason you cannot consume your hot water other than the flat taste. Myself, I always use cold tap water, for the taste.
 
I never use the hot tap water for consumption. Really it is by habit.

I did see to remember something about not using hot tap water for Netipots as it can risk some brain eating nasty that can't get you from drinking, only from snorting the water.

Not even an unusual organism or one that you can't ingest without harm. The gastrointestinal system is tuned up to handle a great deal and to resist a lot more. For instance, you can get giardiasis from drinking directly from open water sources like streams and ponds, but the odds are that you could be exposed many times through that behavior and not become ill.

But a lot of our sensory system is really the brain extruding outside the cranial vault. You eyes are continuous with the optic nerve that is really just part of the brain. The sinuses are barely separated from the brain. The inner ear is arguably a brain portal. And the brain is not at all adept at handling infections. The blood-brain barrier cannot pass most dangerous infections, and when one does get through from somewhere, the same mechanism prevents antibiotics from passing into the brain, making brain infections very difficult to treat. Pumping water and whatever is in it up your nose is driving it right at the brain. (Doing "cannonballs" in open lakes and streams can do essentially the same thing, and they see similar infections and death rates from them from that cause as from the nasal irrigation.)

But even with that known, many, many people use tap water with Neti-Pots and have no problem, because the body is pretty good at its job. But the body can only do so much, and I wonder if those who got in trouble weren't frequent users. Frequent exposure does indeed make a difference.

I had a guy who usually shot up his dope with tap water. One night, he had scored and found himself along an urban creek that ran below an area where sewers leaked. He had never had a problem with tap water, in spite of the bugs that are always in it. But after shooting up sewery creek water, he died a lingering death from such an array of infections that they couldn't document them all.


On the hot/cold tap water thing, I'm kind of with Greg. The hot water side just turns out to be not so appealing in terms of taste. But I do get the jump on boiling water for pasta (usual wimpy residential duty gas range problem) by starting with it as hot as the water heater can deliver, which is pretty hot, since we are adults of (on a good day) nearly normal intelligence who have no children to scald themselves.
 
The most important point about consuming hot tap water is that your hot water heater thermostat must be set above a certain minimum temperature or there is danger that various hot water organisms can exist and multiply in your hot water heater and may be a hazard for human consumption. I don't want to get in any argument about exactly what that temperature is (I'm no authority) and I invite everybody to use a search engine and read authoritative sources for advice as to the correct minimum temperature.

And second, just from the aspect of science and physics. It takes the same amount of heat energy to raise the heat of the water no matter whether you use hot tap water from your heater or heat cold tap water on your stove. There many be minor differences in the efficiency of your hot water heater vs. your pot on your stove. The primary differences are (1) it's quicker to use hot tap water because it's already part way hot, and (2) the hot tap water may not taste as good as heating cold tap water because it's had some of the dissolved gases evaporated out of it, probably for many hours in most cases, depending on your household rate of water consumption.

In the end as long as your hot water heater is set properly there is probably not much difference either way. But I prefer heating cold tap water when cooking. Okay maybe not important when boiling pasta because you're going to throw out most of the water anyway. (Italian cooking aficionados probably use the pasta water for something, might make a difference there.)

Set the hot water heater temperature properly and no big deal either way.
 
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Greg, maybe you live in a house that is new enough that you have no concern that there might be lead solder leaching into the water. That's the bigger concern for me.
 
Our apartment building was built in the 1970's, with the various plumbing problems we have had in 12 years, I don't trust our plumbing to be up to snuff. We also have very hard water (high mineral content) and I prefer to use the coldest water out of the tap and filter that for consumption, even for boiling water for pasta.
 
did not know about hot water being unsafe to consume. long ago, i used to use hot water for heating water as a convenient short cut way to reaching a boil. i stopped doing it simply because i didn't want to waste water by running the tap long enough to get hot. good to know, thank you tl and frank....

but i think i'm more likely to have a mineral deficiency than an excess.
 
The hot tap water that I've sampled at the various locations where I've lived had an off taste. Many residences, including my present one, have tankless hot water heaters and some of us (including my 94 and 103 year old neighbors) do not enjoy the 'benefits' :sick:of chlorinated water.
 
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Our apartment building was built in the 1970's, with the various plumbing problems we have had in 12 years, I don't trust our plumbing to be up to snuff. We also have very hard water (high mineral content) and I prefer to use the coldest water out of the tap and filter that for consumption, even for boiling water for pasta.
The house in the City was built in the 70s. One of the things I had done recently (2005) was to have all the plumbing upgraded. I didn't have any lead pipes, but there were other issues.
 
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